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US President Donald Trump said on 13 October that the US continues to share intelligence with Ukraine, following reports that Washington had threatened to suspend intelligence assistance unless Kyiv stopped striking Russian oil refineries, POLITICO reported.
The comments came after Ukraine received no advance warning from its partners ahead of Russia's latest ballistic missile strike, raising fresh questions about intelligence sharing between Kyiv and Washington.
“We are helping them, and we are sharing intel. We want the war to end,” Trump told reporters at the White House, according to POLITICO, reaffirming US support after his recent efforts to reach an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin drew criticism over his approach to the war.
Last week, the US threatened to cut intelligence sharing if Ukraine did not stop attacking Russian oil refineries. Zelenskyy did not publicly confirm the reported threat.
The reports came amid criticism of Trump’s announcement of a deal to buy Russian oil and his pressure on Kyiv to make concessions, even as Russia continued attacking Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had refrained from striking Russian oil refineries and the energy sector for two days after Trump announced an energy ceasefire. Russia, however, continued attacking Ukrainian energy facilities and critical infrastructure, he said, with 19 Ukrainian regions coming under attack during those two days.
Trump said Monday that both Russia and Ukraine had violated the energy ceasefire, arguing that each side was responsible. He also said Putin wanted a deal and that Washington needed to persuade Zelenskyy to agree.
Trump's latest comments publicly reaffirm that intelligence sharing is continuing. However, the circumstances surrounding the latest Russian strike have raised questions about whether Ukraine is receiving the early warnings it needs to protect civilians.
Early warnings of incoming Russian ballistic missiles give Ukrainians a brief window to reach shelter before impact. US intelligence helps make those warnings possible, giving civilians crucial time to protect themselves.
Zelenskyy said Russia's latest attack involved five ballistic missiles and more than 100 drones, and that Ukraine received no warning from its partners before the strike.
“Intelligence on Russian ballistic missile launches helps save lives,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday. “This is precisely what helps prevent people from being killed — when there is an early warning about ballistic missiles.”
He added that Ukraine had received no warning ahead of the attack.
Ukraine normally receives alerts about impending Russian missile launches through the Battlespace Command and Control Center, a system operated by the US military and NATO members, among others, POLITICO reported.
Citing an unnamed official familiar with the matter, POLITICO reported that US officials attributed the missing warning to bad weather. The explanation reportedly raised doubts among Ukrainian officials.
Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said the warning system had failed to transmit information on previous occasions. He said specialists would work with international partners to resolve any technical problems.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Tuesday that intelligence sharing through the platform was continuing, according to POLITICO.
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Russian forces struck several districts of Kyiv late on 12 October with what the Air Force called, by preliminary data, six ballistic missiles. For once, the air-raid alert reached people only after the attack had begun, Ukraine’s Air Force reported.
Reports of Russian ballistic launches are part of the intelligence the US shares with Ukraine, and that data is what lets sirens sound before the missiles arrive, giving civilians a few minutes to hide. Those minutes save lives, which is why the warning gap landed hard amid fears that Washington could cut Ukraine off from such intelligence amid US President Donald Trump's agreement with Russia to let its diesel into the US.
The alert came late because Ukraine’s radar detected the ballistic targets only during the attack, with no advance data on launches from Russian territory, according to the Air Force.
“No information was received about launches from enemy territory. The causes are being established,” the Air Force said.
The stakes are human, presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov, known as Flash, stressed.
“This information is needed first of all by civilians, so that people have time to hide in a shelter,” he said.
Beskrestnov says he does not want to believe the US would leave Ukraine without that data because it is a matter of civilian survival. He urged caution on the cause, saying there were nuances and that it was too early to draw conclusions.
However, Ukraine usually sees the launches first. The warning system normally flags Russian ballistic launches before the missiles reach their targets, giving people time to move, but on 12 October, that did not happen, the Air Force noted.
Beskrestnov later added a note of doubt about what flew. The suspected S-400 missiles were not being recorded by partners’ intelligence services, he wrote, stopping short of blaming the lapse on a loss of US data.
The damage in Kyiv was concrete. A missile struck a transport-infrastructure site in the Dniprovskyi district, and another hit a four-story warehouse in the Desnianskyi district, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
Russia struck Kharkiv at about the same time with nine S-8000 Banderol loitering munitions, Mayor Ihor Terekhov reported. One of the last strikes hit a residential building, where people may be trapped under the rubble and a fire is burning.
“Very serious destruction, an entire stairwell collapsed,” Terekhov said.
Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) released information on the components of Russia’s Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile and the companies involved in its production, according to a statement dated 12 October.
Russia has used Kinzhal missiles to strike targets across Ukraine since the start of its full-scale invasion. However, 22 of the 58 companies in Russia’s Kinzhal production network are not subject to sanctions, the intelligence agency noted.
Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence has published an interactive 3D model of the Russian Kinzhal missile on its War&Sanctions portal.
The 9-S-7760 missile, known as the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, uses solid fuel and has a single stage. This means the missile does not consist of multiple stages that separate sequentially during flight. About 90% of its components are identical to those used in the 9M723 ballistic missile of the Iskander-M system, HUR noted.
The Kinzhal is equipped with a radar homing seeker, an active jamming station, and a decoy deployment system, according to the statement. The homing seeker helps the missile determine the direction to its target, while decoys are designed to make interception by air defense systems more difficult.
The missile can carry one of two types of warheads: a penetrating high-explosive warhead or a nuclear warhead. Russia is also developing a version with a high-explosive fragmentation warhead that strikes targets through an explosion and fragments. HUR believes this development may be linked to problems with the missile’s accuracy.
In 2026, Russia significantly reduced its state procurement order for Kinzhal missiles and redirected some production resources, components, and raw materials towards manufacturing Iskander-M missiles, HUR noted. Another reason is the limited number of MiG-31I and MiG-31K aircraft used to launch Kinzhal missiles, the intelligence agency reported.
Despite their high speed, Russian Kinzhal missiles can be intercepted using US-made Patriot surface-to-air missile systems. In particular, PAC-3 interceptor missiles are designed to destroy ballistic targets and can be used against threats such as the Kinzhal and Zircon, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense reported.
Ukraine is seeking additional Patriot interceptor missiles to defend against Russian ballistic attacks during the winter.
Most of the approximately 1,000 missiles Kyiv has contracted for are not expected to arrive for several years, prompting Ukraine to ask its allies to supply missiles from their existing stockpiles, Defense News reported on 12 October 2026.
Russia continues to use foreign components in missile production despite sanctions. For instance, the US-made Texas Instruments processors were found again in a newer version of the Kinzhal missile, Ukrainian presidential commissioner for sanctions policy Vladyslav Vlasiuk said in September, Interfax reported. According to him, foreign electronics continue to reach Russia through various supply channels.
Earlier, Ukraine had provided its partners with information on more than 100 Russian companies involved in ballistic missile production and urged them to impose sanctions on those entities, according to the President's Office.
On 12 October, the EU Council imposed sanctions on 1,569 individuals and entities linked to Russia’s military-industrial complex, including 826 Russian companies and 743 company CEOs.
Ukraine has published data on 20 vessels that carry Russian oil and liquefied natural gas or refuel the sanctioned fleet, parts of the logistics network the Kremlin uses to fund its war, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence reports. All 20 are under British or Ukrainian sanctions, and only one faces US restrictions.
Russia’s shadow fleet runs on roughly 500 aging ships of uncertain ownership that dodge sanctions and keep oil money flowing. That seaborne oil trade is worth more than 80 billion euros a year.
The headline vessel is the Russian ship Portovyy, an LNG carrier and floating gas store owned by the sanctioned Gazprom since 2021, according to the agency. On 15 August 2026, it left the Gulf of Finland with Russian LNG for the first time since November 2021, sailing the Northern Sea Route to the Chinese port of Beihai to unload.
Portovyy is now at the Zhoushan Huafeng Shipyard in China, which has been set as the site for its maintenance, intelligence says, an example of the foreign yards Kyiv wants closed to the sanctioned fleet.
Two more gas carriers show how Moscow expanded the fleet in spring 2026 through front companies, intelligence said. The Avacha, once owned by China’s Jovo Energy, was bought by the little-known Tudor Maritime of the Marshall Islands, took the Russian flag in June, and now ships gas from the Arctic LNG 2 project to Beihai.
The Chaivo, formerly owned by Greece’s Maran Gas Maritime, was also bought by Tudor Maritime and moved under the Russian flag in July. Now it carries cargo to Beihai from a floating gas storage facility off Kamchatka, intelligence says.
Intelligence urged partners to act together: tighten control over sales of commercially owned ships, block servicing of the sanctioned fleet at foreign yards, and cut off the energy revenue that Russia turns into weapons against civilians.
Russia is building ice-class ships at home and, at the same time, widening its shadow fleet through offshore networks. The UK Foreign Office made the same point on 1 October, saying Moscow is assembling a new shadow fleet to keep its gas revenues flowing.
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Russian forces appear to use AI to plan air attacks and recognize targets amid raids on Ukrainian cities. This may include recent air attacks on Odesa that have come in waves with short gaps, Deputy Air Force Commander for Air Defense Colonel Yurii Cherevashenko says, Ukrinform reports.
Russia has already equipped its jet-powered Geran-4 drones with machine vision, allowing them to recognize and track targets on their own in the final seconds of flight. Recently, a single jet drone hit a locomotive in Odesa Oblast in late September and killed two railway workers.
The scale of Russia's AI use is hard to measure, Cherevashenko continues, but Ukrainian specialists already see its elements in how attacks are organized. The long, wave-by-wave strikes on Odesa would be far harder to plan and coordinate without it, he believes.
"Russian forces use AI to lay out attack routes and to recognize targets," Cherevashenko says, framing it as his own assessment rather than a confirmed fact.
Odesa Oblast is home to the biggest port in Ukraine, "Southern". Protecting it is a challenging task as guarding the airspace over water is tougher than over land, Cherevashenko says. Some air defense assets do not perform as well at sea, and in some cases, crews can intercept a target only as it approaches.
Weather adds to the problem, with storms and fog, while the open sea gives Russia more freedom to choose drone routes and launch points. To protect ports and the coast, Ukraine uses drone motherships, platforms that carry other drones aloft to extend their flight time and keep watch over set areas.
Ukraine is also building its own AI for air defense. Automated turrets using machine vision now help counter Russian drones. According to Army Media, the Air Force says such turrets have scored their first shoot-downs, including of Geran-5 jet drones, with one soldier saying 50 rounds were enough to bring down a Geran.
Ukraine's Defense Ministry is going further. In late September, it unveiled an AI system called SPECTR, built by its A1 Artificial Intelligence Center and already in testing with several combat units, to analyze battlefield data, predict Russian moves, and suggest options to commanders.
Russia's Kalashnikov concern has met its annual arms contract. The top producer of small arms has announced it delivered a batch of classic 7.62mm Dragunov sniper rifles to a Russian Security Forces customer and fully met its 2026 contract on time
The delivery shows how little the sanctions regime slows Russia's arms maker. In February 2026, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence said that nearly half of Kalashnikov's plants were still not subject to sanctions by any coalition country. Eight months later, the concern reports a full year's order delivered on schedule.
"The items were shipped on the set deadline, the obligations under the 2026 contract fully met," the manufacturer said.
The weapon in that batch is not new. Designed by Yevgeny Dragunov between 1958 and 1963, the Dragunov sniper rifle entered serial production at the Izhevsk machine-building plant in 1963, so in 2026, it has remained in serial production for more than 60 years.
The self-loading 7.62mm rifle is meant to hit personnel and unarmored targets at ranges up to 800 meters, the concern said. It uses gas-operated automatics with a short-stroke piston and a gas regulator, and can fire any 7.62x54R round, though sniper ammunition yields the best grouping, according to the maker.
The sniper rifles are only one line in Kalashnikov's output. Russia's defense industry has leaned heavily on refurbishing Soviet-era armor as newer reserves run low, with Ukraine's intelligence reporting in June 2025 that Russia had begun deploying 1960s-era T-62 tanks.
The restoration work was centered primarily at the 103rd Armored Repair Plant in Atamanovka, Trans-Baikal Territory of Siberia. Ukrainian intelligence documented the transfer of 21 T-62 tanks from the eastern region to the western part.
Small arms are a different line of production, built new rather than pulled from storage. That is why a 1963 design keeps rolling off the line while the sanctions net, as Ukraine's intelligence describes it, still has holes.
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Russia is preparing to make daily life in Kyiv harder before winter, aiming at the ordinary places civilians use rather than at military sites, The Economist reported. Ukrainian officials say the push blends bombing, sabotage, and disinformation, and expect it to peak in November.
Every winter of its full-scale invasion, Russia has tried to freeze Ukrainians into surrender, and each year the strikes reach deeper into ordinary life. The civilian casualties recorded in 2026 have already passed the whole of last year, the UN says.
Russia has already turned its drones on Kyiv's supermarkets, food warehouses, and data centers this year. On 28 September, a Russian jet drone struck the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv. The strike killed two people, the Academy said. Survivors climbed from the windows of the burning building. A senior Ukrainian official told The Economist the Kremlin now wants shoppers too afraid to enter a store. Russia is also keeping its winter routine, hitting electricity, water, and sewage systems.
Most of the damage now comes from Russia's cheap jet drones, The Economist said. Pilots guide them onto targets and watch a live video feed. They are hard to stop, and Russia's ballistic missiles are deadlier still as Ukraine's supply of Patriot interceptors dwindles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv had agreed a new Patriot interceptor package, but it remains short of interceptors of its own. A security official told The Economist that Russia has thousands of drones stockpiled and plans to use its entire ballistic missile stock within two months.
Ukraine's counter-intelligence services say they foil seven or eight Russian plots a week, and officials believe some sleeper cells remain. The campaign's third element, disinformation, targets war fatigue and corruption scandals. Russia runs the same plan every year, hoping its bot farms will push Ukrainians onto the streets to demand surrender, said Andrii Kovalenko, who heads the Center for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council.
"It's nonsense," he told The Economist, adding that someone is feeding the idea to Putin so they can steal more money.
Kyiv is also far harder to shut down than Moscow assumes, Kovalenko said. The city's internet is too decentralized for a handful of strikes to knock out, The Economist noted. Energy expert Olha Babii said the test is how fast crews restore power, not whether it can be destroyed. The capital is emptying, its population down from about 3.7 million to 3.3 million by The Economist's count.
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Russian intelligence services have sharply stepped up building websites and social media pages that impersonate Ukrainian state bodies and media, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) warned. Moscow uses the fakes to spread disinformation and to steal personal data it can turn into spy recruitment. The SBU says it has already blocked dozens of clones of its own brand.
The fake sources serve Russian psychological operations and disinformation campaigns, the SBU said on 28 September. Their aim is to destabilize the situation inside Ukraine and damage its position abroad. Russian intelligence also uses them to extract Ukrainians' personal data, the agency said.
Alongside its full-scale invasion, Russia wages war on Ukraine in the cyber domain and through espionage and sabotage. Every agent Russia recruits inside Ukraine can help steer missiles and drones onto targets, and the SBU keeps catching such recruits.
Russians often hack the accounts of users who subscribe to the fake pages and messenger channels, the SBU found. They then use the stolen information for recruitment operations and to collect confidential data.
Moscow is most interested in the combat and operational work of Ukraine's defense and security forces, the agency said. The SBU's cybersecurity department found and blocked more than 50 resources that copied the agency's own branding and positioning.
The fake pages are not Russia's only digital tool. Earlier in September, Anthropic said it had caught Russian spies running a campaign against Kyiv on its Claude AI chatbot.
The SBU urged citizens not to follow suspicious links and to rely only on official sources. Anyone who sees a dubious web address, or gets a message from someone posing as an SBU officer, should call the 1516 hotline, the agency said.
The SBU's own reports from the past week show what Russia's recruits are tasked with. A mobilized soldier allegedly recruited by the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, tried to direct a Russian missile strike on his own unit in Kharkiv Oblast, the SBU said. His repair battalion restores Ukrainian drones.
A Lviv Oblast resident who worked at a drone production site in western Ukraine was allegedly recruited to guide a missile strike on it, the agency reported. The strike was meant to disrupt the steady supply of strike and reconnaissance drones to Ukrainian troops, the SBU said.
A court also sentenced a 17-year-old agent of Russia's military intelligence (GRU), exposed in November 2024, to 10 years in prison, the SBU announced. She tracked Ukrainian air defenses in Chernihiv Oblast under the cover of taxi rides. She talked to her GRU handler through an anonymous messenger chat.
Russia has quietly started a new round of mobilization and plans to bring in more North Korean troops, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. He cited a new report from Ukraine's military intelligence. The same day, the Kremlin published a decree enlarging Russia's army for the fourth time this year.
Zelenskyy spoke in his evening address on 28 September, after a briefing from Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR).
"In effect, the Russians have already begun additional mobilization—they are increasing the number of people they recruit through various means," he said.
Moscow also plans to recruit more foreigners, Zelenskyy said. He urged the governments of countries whose citizens Russia recruits to counter it, and said Kyiv would inform each of them.
Ukraine says Russia has been losing soldiers faster than contract recruitment replaces them. If so, an unannounced call-up lets the Kremlin refill its ranks without a formal draft. ISW says Putin may hold off on such a draft until he sees whether his strikes work. Ukrainian intelligence had expected Russia to announce a mass mobilization after this month's State Duma elections.
More than 8,000 North Korean troops are currently on Russian territory, Zelenskyy said. Pyongyang is selecting another 10,000 for training and deployment to Russia, he added.
Russia is paying, among other things, with technology, according to Zelenskyy. North Korea has launched production of Shahed-type attack drones with Russian technical support, he said.
That is a step beyond what Kyiv reported in June 2025. Moscow and Pyongyang had then only agreed to start preparing such production. In August, Zelenskyy warned that Russia could receive up to 50,000 North Korean troops.
Putin's decree sets the authorized strength of Russia's armed forces at 2,441,630, including 1,550,500 military personnel, Vedomosti reported. The decree gives no reason.
The order adds 15,500 troops and is the fourth such increase this year, Euronews said. Since March, the combined increase has reached 47,860 soldiers. Putin's 2022 "partial mobilization" decree also remains in force, the outlet noted.
In early September, Putin claimed that reports of a coming mobilization were "complete nonsense" and "an information attack on Russia." Russian officials gave similar assurances days before the 2022 call-up.
Ukraine's military and foreign intelligence had earlier said that Russia's General Staff prepared a scenario to mobilize 600,000 people over 2026 and 2027, 300,000 each year.
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Ukraine's defense forces intercepted 55% of Russia's jet-propelled drones in September—more than 1,500 out of over 2,730 launched—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his 26 September evening address.
Russia's full-scale aerial campaign has shifted from propeller-driven Shaheds Ukraine learned to shoot down at over 90% to jet-propelled models that fly faster, resist jamming, and often slip past existing defenses.
Zelenskyy said military intelligence had briefed him on Russian weapons production—not just jet Shaheds but other technological systems. The documents detail what Moscow is preparing for next year: the volumes and the financing. "We are preparing our countermeasures, and for every line item there must be a Ukrainian answer," he said.
Several effective interceptor prototypes are already in combat.
"Interceptors have been identified that can become the main tool of our defense. Production, components—all of this we are scaling up. There will be an answer," Zelenskyy said.
The goal is to match the interception rate for regular propeller-driven Shaheds, which exceeds 90%. At 55%, the jet-drone rate is climbing but still leaves nearly half reaching their targets.
Russia plans to spend $12 billion in 2027 on jet drones and loitering munitions alone, Zelenskyy said. "This concerns not only Ukraine and not only us," he added, warning that multiple intelligence agencies have information Russia wants to expand its war to other countries and regions.
He said this is why Ukraine is pushing for stronger sanctions and the Drone Deal format. Ukraine has signed 11 such agreements, the latest with Finland at the UN General Assembly this week, and is preparing a 12th with what Zelenskyy called "a strong country."
The warning came as Russia struck a Kyiv data center twice on the morning of 27 September, injuring three people including two children, Zelenskyy wrote. Overnight strikes killed three people in Zaporizhzhia Oblast and one man in Kyiv.
In total this week, Russia launched more than 2,200 strike drones, roughly 1,650 aerial bombs, and 38 missiles—a significant share of them ballistic—at Ukraine, he said.
Russia's jet-propelled Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones have become the dominant threat in Russia's aerial campaign against Ukrainian cities. By August, production of jet Geran-4/5 models exceeded that of propeller-driven Geran-2s, according to Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR). Russian factories produce roughly 3,000 jet models per month alongside about 2,800 of the older type. The Geran-5 is technically a drone but functions as a small cruise missile—faster, harder to jam, and increasingly guided by AI and mesh networking that complicate interception.
Ukraine's answer has been interceptor drones—cheap, fast enough to chase a Geran, and guided by machine vision. A Ukrainian interceptor recently scored its first kills against jet Gerans and is heading into mass production, though a presidential adviser warned that speed alone cannot catch them—machine vision and automatic guidance decide the chase.
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Ukraine is building an artificial intelligence system to analyze battlefield data, help commanders plan operations, and forecast Russia's possible moves, its Defense Ministry said. The system keeps the data it runs on behind a protected perimeter.
The logic behind the project: Ukraine can already read the battlefield from drone footage and sensor feeds, but converting that picture into orders is the harder, still-human half where wars are decided.
SPECTR comes from A1, the AI center inside Ukraine's Defense Ministry. Its head, Danylo Tsvok, said Ukraine holds a unique store of data on how this war is fought, and SPECTR is designed to help turn that into a real edge on the ground.
The system is built to analyze incoming information, spot patterns, draft recommendations for planning operations, and automate the routine work in headquarters. Troops would work with frontline information faster.
"Essentially, we are building an operating system for warfighting. It will help the military choose effective courses of action and predict the enemy’s possible moves," Tsvok said.
SPECTR will run inside systems the Defense Forces already use, and on local devices set aside for sensitive data.
The ministry set up A1 in March 2026 with backing from the UK government, aiming to turn AI into Ukraine's battlefield advantage and build an "AI-driven army." That effort runs along three tracks: faster, data-based decisions, AI built into weapons and less bureaucracy in the ranks. The center is working on three flagship projects. Some of its solutions are already being tested by units.
Ukraine is opening its battlefield data to British weapons makers so they can train their AI on a war no one else has fought. Up to 12 British defense companies will join Avengers Labs, Ukraine's platform for training AI models for drones and robots on real combat data, the Defense Ministry said.
Ukraine's combat data is a resource no other military has access to. British firms get to build and test their AI on battlefield data they could not access elsewhere, while Ukraine gets their technology and joint development of AI for unmanned systems.
What is Avengers Labs?
More than 30 Ukrainian companies already use the Avengers Labs, and three of their systems have reached the battlefield. It is part of the AI push former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov built around Ukraine's data.
The terms are built around control. The British companies can develop and test their own AI models within Avengers Labs, the ministry said, but the data remains within the platform's protected environment, with no way to download it or take it out. That lets Ukraine share the value of its war experience, the annotated record of real combat, without surrendering the record itself.
The platform was developed by the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies, the team that created the DELTA combat system. At the core of Avengers Labs is an annotated dataset of 5 million frames collected on the battlefield. Most of this material comes directly from the DELTA combat system and is continually supplemented with new data of practical value in combat conditions.
Britain trains for a real war
In March 2026, Ukraine announced the establishment of a system of military technology competence centers. The first in the network was intended to be the Defense AI Center "A1," which would focus on AI solutions.
The AI center is being launched with support from the UK. Its main tasks were planned to be:
analysis of combat data;
forecasting enemy actions;
development of autonomous systems;
new management/control tools
A separate center was said to have been established for each key direction of the war: drones, mid-range strike, deep strike, artillery, and others.
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Since Madagascar’s October 2025 coup, Russian military personnel have joined the parliament speaker’s security detail, and Russian instructors have begun training Malagasy soldiers, RFE/RL reported. OSINT investigators traced a flight carrying a senior Russian military intelligence officer and 40 of Russia's Africa Corps members to the island on 20 December 2025.
Madagascar’s new leadership has welcomed Russian military assistance, while Moscow has pursued media projects, energy talks, and the possible recruitment of Malagasy workers. RFE/RL says the prospective destination is Alabuga, a plant producing drones used against Ukraine. Elsewhere in Africa, Russia has sent troops, sought access to resources, and opened cultural centers.
Major General Andrei Averyanov, who oversees Russian military intelligence operations in Africa, was on the December flight. He traveled with members of Africa Corps, a Russian Defense Ministry unit that absorbed some Wagner forces. Madagascar's National Assembly speaker Siteny Randrianasoloniaiko announced the unit’s arrival that month.
Russian intelligence officer Anton Papshev attended the January launch of training for Madagascar’s 1st Airborne Battalion. The program also included a transfer of Russian weapons, though RFE/RL did not specify which ones. In February, interim President Michael Randrianirina met Vladimir Putin in Moscow and welcomed wider cooperation on defense, energy, and other areas.
Russian authorities signed a deal with Randrianasoloniaiko to open a Russia House, a Kremlin cultural center. Ukraine’s military intelligence said Moscow plans to expand the network across Africa to influence young people. Madagascar also authorized a branch of African Initiative, a Russia-linked media organization that helped National Radio launch a “Russ-Mada” program.
RFE/RL said Russian authorities appear to intend to recruit Malagasy workers for Alabuga, a drone assembly plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region.
The plant has recruited thousands of workers, mainly young women from Africa and Central and South Asia, for relatively high-paying jobs. Richard Rakotonirina, head of Madagascar’s Friends of Russia association, visited Alabuga in February. RFE/RL did not establish that any Malagasy workers had been recruited.
During a visit to Moscow, Madagascar’s prime minister discussed Russian fuel supplies, oil storage on the island, and military training.
A Russian delegation also visited an abandoned naval base that Madagascar and France had already agreed to study restoring. RFE/RL did not report any agreement giving Russia access to the base.
Madagascar’s emerging ties resemble security arrangements Moscow has built elsewhere in Africa. In the Central African Republic, Russian mercenaries guarded officials and trained troops in exchange for access to gold, diamonds, and timber, RFE/RL reported. Russia's Africa Corps protects the Republic of the Congo’s president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, who has ruled since 1979, apart from a brief interruption.
In Mali, the force backs a military government and has deployed a drone of a type developed for Russia’s war against Ukraine. Residents and a rights group told RFI that Russian and Malian forces killed four civilian herders. Ukrainian drone specialists are reportedly supporting forces fighting Russian troops there.
OpenAI, the US company behind ChatGPT, will hand Ukraine's government free access to a cyber-defense system and its most powerful artificial-intelligence (AI) model, Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. The company unveiled the deal alongside the UN General Assembly, pitching it as a cyber shield for the hospitals and power plants Russia keeps targeting.
Russia's war on Ukraine runs through wires as much as skies. Its hackers have hammered energy, transport, and defense networks for years, on top of the blackouts its missiles already force on Ukrainian cities—and Western tech firms have kept stepping in to help hold the line.
The tool is called Daybreak. It scans digital systems, finds their weak points fast, and helps specialists close them, the report said. Daybreak handles the whole job on its own—a loop of inventory, detection, verification, assignment, remediation, and confirming the fix held.
The system is meant to shield civilian infrastructure, hospitals and power stations among it, from cyberattacks, BBC reported. Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) logged nearly 6,000 cyberattacks in 2025.
The agreement opens access to GPT 5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship and strongest model. The company built it for complex professional work—programming, research, science, and cybersecurity, the report said. Both come as part of one agreement between OpenAI and Kyiv.
George Osborne—Britain's former chancellor and now Head of OpenAI for Countries—put the aim plainly.
"Protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks, so people can continue to live, work and access essential services," he said.
Independent analysts called the deal useful but not unprecedented. Rafe Pilling of cyber firm Sophos said it could serve as a force multiplier for a Ukrainian cyber defense that is already highly capable but heavily burdened. Jamie MacColl of the Royal United Services Institute noted that Western tech firms have been supporting Ukraine for some time, partly altruistically but also because they gain valuable intelligence from an active conflict, and that Ukraine already has access to AI tools from OpenAI's competitors, including Google. The same frontier AI capabilities cut both ways—spotting weaknesses helps defenders block hackers and attackers find a way in.
OpenAI's rival Anthropic has restricted access to its most powerful cyber models on those grounds, while OpenAI has opened them to some European firms and UK banks, BBC reported.
A US-based recruit was promised up to $1,500 to surveil a prominent Russian dissident before being offered $40,000 to “eliminate” or “disappear” the target, the US Justice Department (DOJ) said on 15 September.
The charges connect that alleged plot to what prosecutors describe as a wider Russian assassination network operating since at least 2024 against dissidents, defectors, and countries perceived as supporting Ukraine.
A federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted five alleged members of what prosecutors call the “RIS Network”:
Suarez sent the US resident two locations associated with the dissident, according to the indictment. After the resident delivered photographs and videos, prosecutors say, Suarez and Castro made the $40,000 offer. When the resident declined to carry out the killing, they allegedly asked whether he knew “someone [who] can do the work.”
In 2025, the indictment alleges, Kirill Khrameev recruited a US citizen to photograph a target in Lithuania for a promised $200. Yuri Khrameev then offered approximately $25,000 to kill the man. When the recruit refused, Khrameev allegedly proposed a “simpler job”: burning a warehouse or attacking an electrical substation. He said the purpose was to target countries helping Ukraine, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors also allege that Durruthy coordinated travel and logistics for attacks in Prague, Czechia, in June 2024 and in Lithuania that September. The Justice Department did not specify what either attack involved.
All five defendants are charged with conspiracy to finance terrorism, carrying up to 20 years in prison. Yuri Khrameev, Suarez, and Castro also face a murder-for-hire conspiracy charge carrying up to 10 years.
All five remain at large. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow saw no need to comment without “credible evidence,” Reuters reported. An indictment is an allegation, and the defendants are presumed innocent.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, its covert campaign against Ukraine’s Western allies has combined intelligence gathering with escalating sabotage. CSIS found that suspected Russian attacks in Europe nearly tripled from 2023 to 2024, often using locally recruited agents against infrastructure and industries supporting Ukraine.
In August 2025, US prosecutors charged active-duty soldier Taylor Adam Lee with trying to transmit Abrams tank information and deliver hardware to someone he believed represented the Russian government, allegedly in exchange for Russian citizenship. That case involved an American insider allegedly offering military secrets, not a proven Russian recruitment operation.
Sabotage preparation, remote recruitment, and data collection on military sites account for a significant share of Poland's espionage docket, and public arrests have not dented the pace, RBC-Ukraine reported on 15 September. The published figures cover only the highest-complexity investigations, so with district prosecutors' cases counted in, the real scale of Russian activity is larger still.
Russia's covert campaign inside the EU has escalated from online disinformation into physical attacks since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—arson at defense plants, assassination plots, and bomb-rigged drones found at European airports.
Recorded sabotage incidents across Europe tripled between 2023 and 2024 alone. Poland, as NATO's primary overland corridor for Western military aid to Ukraine, sits at the center of that pressure—its railway routes near the Rzeszów logistics hub have drawn particular attention.
Poland's National Prosecutor's Office opened 67 criminal cases under Article 130 of the Criminal Code—espionage and activity on behalf of a foreign intelligence service—during 2025, spokesperson Przemysław Nowak told RBC-Ukraine. In the first eight months of 2026 alone, prosecutors added at least 40 more.
At that pace, 2026 could yield roughly 60 new cases, RBC-Ukraine noted, concluding that the tempo of recruitment and sabotage preparation is not slowing but staying steadily high despite public detentions and strengthened counterintelligence.
Earlier, Polish law enforcement exposed two Russian citizens prosecutors say worked for Russian special services. One of them planned to send an explosive device through a delivery service—part of a wider Russian sabotage campaign that recruits low-cost, expendable operatives for arson and disruption across the EU.
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